User-Driven Healthcare and Narrative Medicine: Utilizing Collaborative Social Networks and Technologies

E-healthcare, Health 2.0, and user driven healthcare are steadily increasing in popularity among patients and healthcare professionals. In spite of this, there is surprisingly little written about the wealth of information available on the Web created by individual healthcare users, in terms of their experiential disease narratives, potential learning, and improved healthcare results. User-Driven Healthcare and Narrative Medicine: Utilizing Collaborative Social Networks and Technologies fills this gap by exploring various individual user driven strategies that move towards solving multiple clinical system problems in healthcare, utilizing real life examples. Documenting individual concrete experiences, reflective observations, abstract conceptualizations and particular instances of active experimentation, this text is a valuable resource not only for the healthcare academic community, but patients interested in social networking to improve their own healthcare outcomes.

Rakesh Biswas is a professor of Medicine in the Center for Scientific Research and Development, PCMS Campus, Bhopal, India. His interests include clinical problem solving applied to patient centered health care and health education. He has extensively published his experiences in clinical problem solving in global academic journals and books. He is presently a deputy editor for BMJ Case reports, UK, chief editor for the International Journal of User Driven Healthcare, US and a regional editor for the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, UK. He is an academic co-investigator in funded programs of research on "User Driven Healthcare" in India and Ireland.

Carmel Mary Martin is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine and Visiting Professor, University of Buckingham, UK and Visiting Research Fellow Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Trinity College, Dublin. She is active in clinical general practice with a particular interest in chronic disease and illness, patient centered care and complex systems. Carmel has a large volume of publications around this area and she also edits a journal section on Complexity in the Health Sciences for the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, UK. Carmel is a lead Clinical Principal Investigator on the Patient Journey Record Program in user driven healthcare at the National Digital Research Center NDRC, an independent organization formed by a consortium of members comprising different academic institutes in Dublin.